Planned Parenthood head Roberts retiring after 27 years

Margaret Roberts started adult life as a classically trained singer and French horn player. She then ended up spending 27 years running a $12.5 million-a-year nonprofit, braving threats and standing up for women’s reproductive rights.

Margaret Roberts started adult life as a classically trained singer and French horn player. She then ended up spending 27 years running a $12.5 million-a-year nonprofit, braving threats and standing up for women’s reproductive rights.

Roberts, a Herkimer native, had given up music for management, teaching at Herkimer County Community College, when the Planned Parenthood Association of the Mohawk Valley started looking for a new president/CEO in 1986. Roberts applied.

“I decided I wanted to practice what I’d been preaching and see if it actually worked, and it appeared to,” Roberts said.

“She had some experience, but mostly we felt that she had the drive and the cool that she was going to need in the position,” recalled Henry Bamberger, a retired rabbi who served on the board that hired Roberts.

Roberts meant to keep her new job for three years; 27 years later, she’s retiring on May 31. She stayed so long, she said, because she loved it.

“Why would you want to leave? Until you get old, that is, then it’s time for new blood,” said Roberts, who leans toward dry, self-deprecating humor.

The board has started a national search for a new president/CEO and its first COO to be based in Schenectady, Roberts said. Her counterpart in Schenectady, Paul Drisgula, is retiring in early August.

A lot has changed since Roberts started – computerization, the addition of surgical services (abortion and two cervical-cancer fighting procedures), a new teen peer counseling program and the 2000 merger that created Planned Parenthood Mohawk Hudson, which provides health care in 12 counties.

Roberts takes pride in Planned Parenthood’s accomplishments, but added another to the list – the staff. “They are just so caring and helpful and expert and welcoming. And that’s the culture that we developed here,” she said.

Roberts gets things done, said Betty-Joan Beaudry, vice president of practice management, crediting her with the recent Utica building renovation.

“Margaret more than anyone else in the organization believed that we needed to stay at our Genesee Street location and build that location out into a first rate, top notch medical facility. It would have been probably far easier to find something that was more basic,” Beaudry said.

But Roberts was committed to the neighborhood and committed to staying close to their patients, she said.

Roberts has faced challenges, too, the biggest one being money, she said.

And then there are the protestors. Daily picketers led Roberts into a legal battle to force them outside a buffer zone by the Utica health center’s entrance. There have also been threats.

But Roberts defends the right of anti-abortion advocates to protest legally as strongly as she defends the right of women to make their own choices about reproductive issues.

Page 2 of 2 - “Obviously they have not stopped us from doing what the community wants and needs us to do,” she said.

So what will Roberts do next? Definitely not sit around, she said. She envisions visiting some of the grandkids in Maine with husband Laurence, sports, volunteer work and possibly a part-time job working with kids, she said.

Roberts also hopes, she said, to find the time to return to her first love – music. Don’t expect her to play a swan song just yet, though.

“I will continue to care,” she promised, “just as much as I always have for the people who need us.”